Trapped in the maze of sales cycles.
Not knowing when the deal will end.
“Will this product even meet our expectations?”
Customers no longer have to go through these whirlwinds of emotions while evaluating a product. This is the promise of Product-Led Growth (PLG), a bold approach that flips the traditional sales model on its head.
Popular companies like Notion or Slack do not require you to talk to a salesperson before accessing their product. You can just sign up and start using them from the get-go. This is what we call Product-Led Strategy/Growth. You let the product sell itself.
Product-led Growth has emerged as a winner for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) businesses as the methodology puts the product itself as the primary driver of customer acquisition, retention, and expansion. SaaS philosophy has always centered around the “Customer is King.” Building a loyal relationship with customers starts with trust, and one of the best ways to gain that is by showing them the value of your product from the very beginning. PLG fits perfectly with this principle, which is why the strategy has garnered a lot of SaaS traction. By the day, we’re seeing lots of companies pivoting towards the PLG motion.
Let’s take a closer look at some of the benefits of a PLG motion in a SaaS environment.
Why is Product-Led Growth important?
Product-led growth emphasizes minimizing the friction points during a customer journey. It’s all about putting your best foot forward and letting your product do the talking. Here are some ways in which PLG benefits companies:
Decreased Time-to-Value
In traditional sales-led motions, the user has to go through a significant portion of the sales cycle to get to the “aha moment.” With buyers’ patience and attention span wearing thin, the faster they get into the product, the better.
PLG enables your buyer’s instant access to your product through freemium models and free trials. Buyers can enter your product, get a feel, and understand how it works – all in a few minutes (or hours, at most). Most free SaaS tools provide essential values in their free tier so they can understand the cover benefits of the product before choosing additional usage or add-ons.
Improved Customer Experience
Product-led growth puts your buyer front and center. Organizations build the product with users in mind, putting your buyers’ comfort and ease of usability first.
Product-led growth comes with a mindset shift — from features to experience. While having great features and benefits is important, none of it will matter if your buyers have a terrible experience using your product.
Increased Scalability
Product-led strategy not only enhances customer experience but also drives business success. Product-led companies tend to scale faster than the rest, simply because it’s easier to onboard customers.
With a broader top-of-funnel approach, users can start interacting with your product earlier in their journey. This is a significant advantage; rather than filling out competitors’ demo requests, prospects evaluate what you have to offer.
Adapts to Buying Behavior
As more millennials move into decision-making roles, the traditional route of talking to a salesperson before purchasing is less taken. Buyers these days are more comfortable buying digitally. This means they go through many review sites, understand product specifications, and prefer click-to-buy methods.
Product-led Growth fits this ideology by offering a more self-serve customer experience. Buyers can now quickly try out the product, and if they like it, purchase it through online transactions.
5 ways SaaS companies can level up their Product-led Growth using Cloud Marketplaces
With a rapidly increasing need for cloud technologies, more and more companies have started leveraging cloud marketplaces to find the perfect solution.
Increase the visibility of your product
Cloud marketplaces like AWS Marketplace, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure Marketplace have millions of buyers looking for a solution. By listing your product, you’ll be opening the door to a vast pool of users who can easily discover, try, and adopt it.
In fact, Canalys predicts that cloud marketplace revenues will shoot up to $45 billion by 2025.
This only solidifies that Cloud Marketplace is a viable source of revenue generation.
Additionally, marketplaces also expose your product to a global audience. This way, many interested buyers from across the world can find your product — all with minimal intervention from sales or marketing.
Make the buyer journey easy
In addition to easy access to software, buyers also have a unified platform to access everything about their purchase — from procurement to billing. Cloud marketplaces eliminate the need to deal with multiple vendors.
Companies that transact more than 30% of their revenue through cloud marketplaces experience a 25% reduction in their sales cycles. Additionally, sellers engaging in co-sell programs with the marketplaces report a 50% reduction in the time taken to close a deal, according to this 4sight study.
Also, platforms like AWS and Microsoft Azure offer a committed cloud spend that organizations can use on third-party software, which encourages a lot of businesses to invest in software and stay within budget.
Boost your market presence
Cloud marketplaces offer an excellent platform for users to share their thoughts about your product. Reviews from real users build credibility and trust for your product. According to BrightLocal, 69% of customers are more inclined to purchase a product with positive reviews.
Moreover, reviews serve as a way for users to interact with each other as well. They can share tips, best practices, and their experience, and foster a sense of community. This aligns perfectly well with the PLG ideology where the product itself drives growth.
Build integrations seamlessly
When a product listed on a cloud marketplace integrates seamlessly with the cloud provider’s infrastructure (AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud), it drastically reduces setup time for users. For example, if a SaaS product easily integrates with Amazon S3 or Azure Active Directory, users can start deriving value from the product faster. This aligns with PLG by shortening the time to value and enhancing user satisfaction.
Cloud marketplaces also support pre-built integrations with popular tools and services, allowing users to deploy and connect the product with their existing workflows without complex configurations. This smooth onboarding process ensures that users experience value quickly, which is the foundation of Product-Led Growth.
Lower barriers to entry
Accelerated time-to-value is one of the core pillars of Product-Led Growth. Offering free trials fits the bill perfectly as it helps users explore your product easily without any financial commitment.
Plus, free trials often come up with self-serve onboarding processes, allowing users to get started with minimal setup. Buyers can jump right into experiencing the core functionalities of the product. And once they’ve got a taste of your value, they’re more likely to convert to paying customers.
Cloud marketplaces enhance easier points of entry by enabling free trials and freemium models for your product.
3 Examples of SaaS Cloud Marketplace Successes
Here’s how Rocketlane and Fraudblock enhanced their Product-Led Growth strategies by listing on AWS Marketplace.
Logz.io increased its AWS-generated opportunities by 157%
Logz.io combined Cloud Marketplace and Co-sell capabilities through a Labra, Cloud GTM platform, to achieve a 157% increase in cloud revenue.
Logz.io is a leading unified observability platform that helps businesses monitor and analyze their cloud environments. Check out their platform for free on their AWS Marketplace listing.
Rocketlane improved customer experience via AWS Marketplace
Rocketlane used AWS Marketplace capabilities such as offering free trials and freemium offerings, as part of their PLG strategy.
Fraudblock uses flexible pricing options as a growth lever
AWS Marketplace offers flexible usage-based pricing options. Fraudblock used this as an advantage to push user-based pricing for their customers’ API-usage-based pricing demands.
In a Nutshell
Product-led growth is transforming how SaaS companies approach their market strategies. As more and more companies adopt the PLG motion, the emphasis on user experience and ease of access will only grow stronger. Companies are shifting towards providing the greatest product experience to attract and retain customers.
By leveraging cloud marketplaces, you can reach a wide variety of audiences, streamline the buyer journey, and unlock a whole new revenue channel.
Begin your PLG journey on the cloud marketplace with Labra.io
